Leah Umansky

Leah Umansky (Poetry) | New York, NY

Booking Fee:

Negotiable

Will Travel:

Anywhere

Contact:

ladybronte_at_aol.com

Website:

http://www.LeahUmansky.com

Leah Umansky is the author of the dystopian-themed Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), the Mad-Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014), voted one of The Top 10 Chapbooks To Read Now in 2014 by Time Out New York, and the full length collection, Domestic Uncertainties, (BlazeVOX, 2013). She is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.She is a superfan of Game of Thrones and Mad Men, and her #GoT poems have recently been translated into Norwegian by Beijing Trodheim. She is also a collage-artist who designed all of her book covers. She has appeared in The New York Times (online), USA Today’s Pop Candy, Coldfront Magazine, and Huffington Post. She often live tweets special events for the Best American Poetry Blog, and also hosts and curates the COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Boston Review, Thrush Literary Review, MAGMA(UK), Forklift, Ohio, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others.

Books

Domestic Uncertainties, (BlazeVOX, 2013). Poetry.

Chapbooks


Blurbs, Press & Reviews

On Straight Away the Emptied World:

“In this speculative knowledge-vacuum, myths and fantasies are constructed, reminiscent of David Bowie song lyrics: ‘My meteor and I ride the galaxies. / It isn’t until my Crater-Queen calls that I have to return.’ This dystopia feels more like a theme park (Welcome to THE EMPTIED WORLD: RIDES, RIDES, RIDES!!!) but if these poems are fanciful, they are boldly so, creating webs of complex likenings.”
Sabotage Reviews (UK)

“Leah Umansky’s new chapbook Straight Away the Emptied World takes up dystopia, and the contemporary obsession with it, as a site of possibility and play, rewiring the genre’s narrative logic, its lock-step, teleological march toward restitution. Throughout Umansky’s chapbook, we’re offered fragmentary depictions of a post-apocalyptic world.”
Entropy Magazine

On Don Dreams and I Dream:

“…a terrific writer”
—Matthew Weiner, creator, executive producer, writer, and director of AMC’s Mad Men, on reading Don Dreams and I Dream

“What I liked about Don Dreams and I Dream was, especially, how Umansky breaks down words and names familiar to the show. ‘In My Next Life, I Want to Be an Ad Man’ utilizes don and drape as verbs. ‘The Times’ blends moments from the show into Umansky’s memories, evoking the ways that we can disappear into works of art, the lines between our own recollections and the plots we’ve watched play out slowly blurring.”
Vol 1 Brooklyn

On Domestic Uncertainties:

“Give me those old habits, but jangle it a little this way and that”. When I read these lines of Leah Umansky’s, I thought of Emily Dickinson’s great lines, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant”, and wondered how she’d feel about this book from one of her literary daughters. I think she’d recognize the stakes and stratagems of Domestic Uncertainties in a happy instant.”
—Cornelius Eady

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